Revolution of the Moon
by heartlesshurt
Summary: Tessa Gray wakes up to too many Herondales and Lightwoods and Fairchilds at the London Institute. But it's not really the London Institute at all, is it? In a world where war is not just a word and grief is a morning routine, what becomes of our villains, our victims? Some die, some live, but one thing is for sure: they all suffer. TMI/TID, AU, standard pairings


**A/N:**

Trying my hand at a TMI/TID crossover in an alternate universe. This is going to be a very emotional rollercoaster, and it might include explicit descriptions of war or sex at some point in the future. University deadlines get in the way of an uploading schedule, so bear with me… Hope you enjoy!

Summary:

Tessa Gray wakes up to too many Herondales and Lightwoods and Fairchilds at the London Institute. But it's not really the London Institute at all, is it? In a world where war is not just a word and grief is a morning routine, what becomes of our villians, our victims? Some die, some live, but one thing is for sure: they all suffer.

* * *

\- ... . / - - - -. / .- .- .- -.- . -. ...

 _When we all fall asleep, where do we go?_

She doesn't remember where it all went wrong. She thinks it might have been the moment those runes sank into her skin, and the screaming started. Maybe it was Jem, crumpling onto the carpet, coughing up ounces of blood as if they were words. Will, confused, but his hands steady and his lips chapped. Or it was never a moment. It was the Sisters' screeching, Nate's betrayal, Mortmain's prison and the whir- whir- whirring of those machines clicking in the back of her mind. Endless and unbeginning, it was never meant to be a story. Because stories end, and this was war.

* * *

Hands are on her body, but she can't be certain. Her skin is burning, from her shoulders down to her wrists and she is desperate to scratch and claw. Her ribcage splices open under the strains of something- something- something is keeping her pressed into the padding of a cot. Her throat is too dry and her tongue tired and water seeps into her open mouth. This is it, she thinks. This is where the struggle ceases.

She wrenches her right arm from the leather bounds crisscrossing her torso. Her fingers maul at her neck, begging for a chain, desperate for metal in the notch of her throat. Her lashes touch her lids, yet the world is a blinding white. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, the sting burning into her brain. _My angel_ , she thinks. A hand circles her wrist in an iron grip, crushing her bones together. She writhes and trashes, but alas, the hand prevails.

 _My angel. My angel. My angel_ \- she could be screaming now. There is a voice on her right shushing and murmuring phrases over and over again. With her arm tied back to the mattress, the hand cages her jaw and holds it open. Liquid slushes over her lips, her chin. Her teeth smash together and then she is howling anew. The white is dimming and shades and shapes are moving, her head feels heavy, the pounding of her heart drowsing down to a mesmerising rhythm. _My angel_ , she pleads one last time. A shadow at the edge of her sight answers.

"Well, someone is excited to see me."

"Shut up, Herondale."

* * *

Afterwards, she recalls the screaming as if it wasn't her own. The first few nights she shuts eyes tightly, hands clenching down on her ears, fingers pulling her hair, the pain almost cancelling out the sound. But not quite. And hence follows the shock. Minutes, hours, the unidentifiable passing of time with her on the mattress, on the tiles, the cold sting soothing the fever in her bones. Her right arm keeps twitching and it takes her so long, too long, to realise the wails are just memories echoing in her skull.

There is nothing for a while then. Just her yelling at the ceiling, howling as though injured beyond death. Like a patient in a cushioned room, blank, vacant, always vacant. And maybe she is. Somewhere she knows, can still acknowledge that something must be wrong. Her thoughts are jumbled and she can't put her finger on them, because when she tries they slip away. She's chasing a shadow conjured in the corner of her vision: vanished when viewed. Is she old? Flickers and flashes of pearls burned onto the backs of her eyelids. The taught pull of her shell suggests otherwise. She dwells upon featherlight grazes along her cheekbones and lips on her neck, but the face that body carries is scarred and wrinkled. Time drops a stone into a pond, watching as the water ripples and the lines stretch themselves further and further across the surface. She recalls features and voices and smell, but it is blurred. She fears. What, she is not sure, only that there are dreams and there are memories and she cannot decide which are which, and who is who.

* * *

She knows the time, currently. Through the window on her right, she spies the sun reaching its final point before the fallout begins. And though she knows it must be afternoon now, she cannot fathom what that means.

She knows Jem. The boy shrouded in silver and song, beautiful but brittle. His nails scraping gently across the creases of her skin. His eyes, moons waning and waxing, sometimes almost black and sometimes pearls embedded in the pale of his skin. They are familiar, though distant nonetheless, from a lifetime she never met.

She knows Will. The boy with his sneers and his grins, fierce and fragile. His legs pressing into hers, the weight grounding her. His eyes are blue. It hurts to think of blue. It is why she likes the curtains drawn, except when she wants to check the time. The sky, water, a lake so blue engraved in mountains, endless blue and agony splitting her nerves. Those drowning eyes, familiar too, but she prefers to look away.

* * *

Some days the glass is uncovered and she watches the granite and the ash of stone buildings. Forgetting that blue is painful, she follows flights of sparrows and imagines she is one of them. Digging through her thoughts feels like exhuming bodies she does not want to see, so she leaves the dirt unturned for now (forever). There are voices too, sometimes. Whether they are shadows of her mind or reality -friend or foe, she cannot figure it out.

* * *

She thinks she eats or drinks. The curtains are entwined again like embracing lovers, like Philemon and Baucis. She does not recollect closing them, but it seems trivial, so she dismisses the claustrophobia suddenly restraining her ribs' range.

The lines on her arms have paled now, still raised, but no longer crusts and crumbs of skin she scratches off. She traces the shapes often, wonders if the ridges will fade eventually. If grooves will ingrain themselves along the patterns she touches.

* * *

"It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done," Will says. She nods, mind drifting to the sky outside. It is bleak and barren. Her arm is twitching again. She wants to ask Will if he might know her name because she does not think she recalls. Perhaps she was never given one. Who knows? Every so often she feels she was born from the earth, tarnished dirt moulded to body and brain. Made out of poems. Made out of song. The world opened up and she sprouted from the divide. The depths of things unseen colliding with heaven. Yin and yang were harnessed in a frame and she is black and white at once. Not grey, not blended like the weather painted on the glass of her window. She is stark.

* * *

She gathers she should be worried. Should be questioning the locked door and the leather links from earlier and the lack of-

The lack of anything really.

Her tongue tastes foul as she sucks it to the roof of her mouth. The release makes a clicking noise and abruptly all her muscles contract and stiffen. The curtains are open today and she must have sat like that for hours before her arm starts shuddering and she can move. Cracking her knuckles, she stares. And wonders then what it was that triggered her into paralysis.

* * *

A thought trickles into her ears. She thinks, contemplating the meaning of the constellations engraved into her arms. Vines of frost and roses curl up from just above the arteries visible on her wrists, up up up to her biceps and her bony shoulders. Her collarbones cut them off.

* * *

She remembers when she was older. Hair washed out to grey and freckles on her limbs. She was old twice, but she is young now. The lines fade once again and she puzzles and ponders, because there are one, two, thousands and millions of _her_. The girl with the books tenfold. A library, a prison, a home; the options are immortal and she is terrified of what that means.

Boadicea, she thinks they called her. The name simply fits and so the next time she awakens she says it out loud. It comes out garbled and distorted, her throat aches and it hits her that she has not spoken for ages. Will would say it better, she discerns. "Boadicea," she croaks again, the queen to his soldier.

* * *

She knows what they mean sometimes. Other times, she does not. Behind her eyes there is chaos. No recollection; tattoos, she thinks, maybe. She tracks the sentences on her arms once more. The nail of her thumb is too long and jagged, it snags onto a lone crust and the screaming starts.

Afterwards, she figures it must be the marks. _The screams_ , she recalls, but the thought is forgotten before it manifests.

* * *

"Love is a hospital bed," she muses. The wan of the walls does not retaliate, but its colour speaks. The bed, the bounds, the isolation. She concludes she must be sick. Her chest constricts when she turns her head to the window on her right so it could be her ribs, or her lungs, or her heart. She often startles awake, gasping for air. And when her breath calms, she still feels winded, empty. Thus, she musters, this is her hospital bed. She is healing now and soon she will return. No red flags, no alarms bells ringing in her ears as she forgets what she could be returning to, forgets to remember what _is_ besides this room and this hollowness.

A boy with dark hair sits at her side, combing through the strands of hair pasted to her cheeks. He speaks, reading, she thinks: " _I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy._ " She knows he is troubled, the creases in his forehead a library of truth. Longing to graze his hair, her arm shivers. This is love, she imagines. Not the doctors healing her, because she has seen none. Life has no doctors, truly. But this boy next to her is holding her hand as she knits her own flesh together again, stitch by stitch. This boy is love because he will love the ridges of her scars. His hair fascinates her, shifting to ivory in the grey light of the thunderclouds outside.

* * *

The sun has kissed the edges of the horizon and the sky is purple. Somehow that reminds her of hedgehogs and for a moment she tallies her sanity, battling the nausea settling in her stomach.

She breathes. Rousing from a dream, caressing the twisted sheets, she feels as if time has ended. War has come and gone, she reckons. And between these blank plaster walls, with the curtains drawn, her body wrapped in white like the corpses in a morgue, she cannot feel. In the middle of the numb and the nothing, she is somewhat at peace.

* * *

 **A/N:**

And? Tell me what you think!


End file.
